This paper quantifies the relative contribution of domestic, regional and international factors to the fluctuation of domestic output in six key Latin American (LA) countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Using quarterly data over the period 1980:1-2003:4, a multi-variate,...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the cost of financial intermediation in a small open economy with a floating exchange rate and sticky prices. Costly financial intermediation raises the cost of capital and lowers the long-run level of steady state output, capital...

To help maintain price stability in New Zealand a countercyclical use of the goods and services tax (GST) has been proposed. This paper argues that a variable GST rate is unlikely to be a useful stabilisation tool for monetary policy. It first discusses some of the problems that would arise with...

This paper considers Beveridge-Nelson decomposition in a context where the permanent and transitory components both follow a Markov switching process. Our approach insorporates Markov switching into a single source of error state-space framework, allowing business cycle asymmetries and regime...

This paper assesses the effects of asymmetric information and agency costs in credit markets in an open economy with a floating exchange rate and sticky prices. A decline in agency costs lowers the cost of external finance and increases the long-run level of steady state investment, capital and...

The typical New-Keynesian small-open-economy model has qualitative features and monetary-policy prescriptions similar to their original closed-economy counterparts - i.e. complete stablization of domestic inflation is sufficient for optimal policy. We consider a version of the model here where...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....

Macroeconometric and fi?nancial researchers often use secondary or constructed binary random variables that differ in terms of their sta- tistical properties from the primary random variables used in micro- econometric studies. One important difference between primary and secondary binary...

This paper examines the sources of Australia’s business cycle fluctuations focusing on the role of international shocks and short run stabilization policy. A VAR model identified using robust sign restrictions derived from an estimated structural model is used to aid the investigation. The...

The current economic expansion is one of the more enduring in New Zealand's post-war period. But is this a change from past behaviour? We examine New Zealand's post-war business cycles for the sample period 1946q1 to 2005q4, using a newly developed 60-year quarterly time series for real GDP. The...